The Rosetta Stone 2011 Game Jam is a yearly contest sponsored by Rosetta Stone located in the city of Harrisonburg Virginia, about 2 hours south of washington DC. This year, as opposed to last year from what I'm told, the Game Jam consisted of many more teams and a much higher degree of talent. Though I would say that the talent pool was evenly spread. The format of the contest was a free for all in which contestant teams worked as hard as they could for 36 hours straight (if they could manage it) which ended with the judging of all entries by the Rosetta Stone staff. There were two categories, student and professional, of which there would be first and second place awards.The entries were left to the contestants, all that was asked was that the games submitted include some interpretation of the theme words presented at the opening dinner and that the final submission be a playable game with no major bugs. What wasn't really discussed was whether the games had to be language learning related. And as it turns out, they didn't. In fact all genres and ideas were acceptable. The theme words were: Exploration, Ink and Layers.
How it went down
I arrived with my two team members, Rey Leon and Steve Emmerich, around 3pm. Both of which just finished or are finishing their masters program at Full Sail University in Orlando Florida. After checking in we found our room was a suite complete with kitchenette, living room and two queen sized beds and a pull out. A quick thought that we could skip the game jam and enjoy our complimentary luxurious accomodations passed when we broke into a discussion of some possible game plans. After meeting some of our competitors in the lobby of the hotel, it was clear that we were here for battle, with an uneasy tension we chatted politely knowing that no one wanted to give away any secrets or the level of their abilities.Around six in the evening we made our way to the opening dinner ceremony in which a buffet of london broil and swordfish were served with asparagus, mashed potatos, salad bar and complimentary drinks followed by an apple cobbler desert. What? I like describing the food, especially when it's tasty. Steve created what looked like a mashed potato pyramid on his plate with a side garnish of London Broil and went for seconds.
Ok so eventually the jam began and we were setup in our own private room in the Rosetta Stone facility. It featured a floor to ceiling eraser board, some basic tables and not much else besides the gift basket the RS staff had prepared for each team. At this point I was quite nervous never having participated in a contest of this nature let alone developed a fully playable game with two other people in such a short period of time.
We sprang into action discussing our ideas and jotting things down on the board. Within an hour we were all setup and ready to go with our plan of action. Though it wasn't the most creative game idea, it was an idea we figured we could roll with and evolve as we developed it. It was basically a generic first person exploration style game with a series of mini-games in the form of item collection and word puzzles. Our idea was a little lofty upon retrospect because we'd never used Unity3D which was intended to speed our development up and because we ran into some delays with troubleshooting bugs. Around 3am we decided to head back to the hotel and get some sleep. That was Friday night. More to come in the following post.
